Tuesday, 30 July 2013

PINTY's Pub Wings ~ Buffalo & Caesar

FEB 2013

Back at the beginning of the year I was contacted by Claudia at Pinty's, the makers of Pinty's wings. She mentioned I hadn't reviewed Pinty's wings for a while, and generously wanted to send me some free coupons to review them. They were doing some Super Bowl marketing, and I appreciate when people send things to me for free, so said yes please.

Not long after I received a package in the mail - it was even addressed to Lord of the Wings!

Inside was a pamphlet with their new branding of their wings as Pinty's "Pub & Grill."

Inside that was a bunch of coupons, info, NFL stuff.

There was also a letter about Pinty's and the NFL. I'll give you a minute to read it. I love the pantomime "eatertainment." Go on, read it.

Here is more of their collaboration with football, and if you keep looking, the CFL and NASCAR.

So I went out and used the coupons at the first place that I could find these new wings, which was as a Sobeys. I was happy for the coupon for a free box at 900g because these wings were over $15.99 for a box. I'm willing to admit these might be a more premium box of frozen wings to say your standard box, but that's still a pricy box of wings.

I took two boxes of wings, one of their Caesar wings and one of their Buffalo. Now I'm sad to say that I tried these wings before the Super Bowl and intended to have the review up in time, but, well this blog has been neglected for a while and I'm sorry for that to Pinty's, to you the readers, and to the blog itself. But better late than never right?

CAESAR

Chicken wings with a Caesar drink in mind. I like this out of the box thinking on a chicken wing flavour. Now a Caeser, if you are not familiar, is a cocktail that is basically a Bloody Mary, but made with Clamato instead of tomato juice.

What's great about these wings is that they give different instructions on how you can enjoy these wings. Tossed in sauce or rimmed with salt and dipped ... that's a great idea.

Here's how the box came - full of wings, sauces, rimming agents . . .

The wings are breaded, and pretty big. There aren't many in the package (about 15 ) but these are big for frozen wings. I put them on parchment paper and baked them in the oven, but they give instructions for deep frying and BBQ'ing as well.

BUFFALO

Sometimes you have to go with a classic. Now I do have an issue with these being called Buffalo, especially because they were being baked, I could fry them and thus make that a moot point.

Inside the Buffalo there were not only two types of hot sauce, but blue cheese dressing as well. These wings are all about choice.

Again, they give instructions on different ways to enjoy the wings.

Do note, there is quite the lengthy ingredient list on these wings and the sauces in them.

The Buffalo wings are less seasoned (as in, not at all) compared to the Caesar wings.

I put both wings together to bake - Caesar on the left, Buffalo on the right.

Because the sauces are frozen, I put them in a bowl of warm water to thaw while the wings cooked.

After 30 minutes the wings were ready and actually a bit crisp.

Here is the final product. Looks good right? Lets see how we got there:

With the Caesar wings, I tossed them in the packet of Caesar Rim, what would normally go on the glass of the cocktail.

This is a celery/salty mix and I decided to keep this dry, and use the Caesar Sauce as a dip on the side.

The wings were crispy, and very very salty. Very salty. A little overwhelming on their own. I only used 1 of 2 packets and only used half the wings, but I think one packet is more than enough for the whole box. If it wasn't so salty, these would have been pretty decent on their own.

The Caesar sauce was very tomato-ey and if this is going to be a Caesar, that makes sense. It was a little marinara-ey for my liking, but it did taste Caeser like. The batter on this really wanted to fall off too, which was unfortunate. My only other criticism was that this sauce was too salty as well.

Combining the sauce and the rimmed tossed wings made everything really salty. This was my overarching experience with the Caesar wings.

The Buffalo wings came with two sauces: Medium and Hot, with Medium being a larger bag. The medium tasted like other bottled generic 'Buffalo' sauces, and the Hot, which was actually hot. I mixed the two together.

Buffalo wings have to be tossed in the sauce, so they were.

Those almost look like wings from a pub eh?

Then I added the blue cheese sauce as a thick drizzling.

The Buffalo sauce was (guess what I'm going to say next . . .) salty. But it was a decent buttery hot sauce mixture, and again I appreciated the heat of the hot sauce. The blue cheese sauce was creamy, and salty (but as a blue cheese should be). The combination was ok. Kind of crispy, kind of oily. The chicken was nothing special. No breading, but as a Buffalo it shouldn't.

These were two very interesting wings. Both were pretty big, they turned out crispy, as the sauces had a lot of flavours. There are a lot of options on how to cook and how to serve and eat these wings. I liked the creativity that went into these products.

I have to say my biggest beef with the wings was the high salt content, or at least flavour. It was just not necessary. The Buffalo wings were ok. The flavour was generic, but I feel like they actually put effort into the wing. I was very impressed with the Caesar wings because of the creativity. I haven't seen anyone else do this type of wing, the variations you can eat them, and while they would never be an everyday wing for me, they definitely add to the pantheon of wing flavours.

Would I get them again? Yes, but only on sale. I'm interested in the other new flavours they have, but have yet to try them. Thank's Pinty's for letting me try these.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Thanks for the review! Trying the buffalo ones tonight (on sale) and was wondering how spicy the sauces were, this clears it up. They were out of Caesar ones, but I was totally expecting they'd be creamy, as in Caesar dressing - never seen a wing mimic the drink instead.